Distributed Shared Memory enables programs to access data in traditional virtual memory . It is primarily a tool for parallel application or a group of applications in which individual shared data items can be accessed directly. In systems that support Distributed Shared Memory, data moves between secondary memory and main memory as well as between main memories of different nodes. Each node can own data stored in the shared address space, and the ownership can change when data moves from one node to another. When a process accesses data in the shared address space, a mapping manager maps the shared memory address to the physical memory. The mapping manager is a layer of software implemented either in the operating system kernel or as a runtime library routine.

The Distributed Shared Memory spares the programmer the concerns of message passing when writing applications that might otherwise have to use it. Shared memory provides the fastest possible communication, hence the greatest opportunity for concurrent execution.

        
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